Ishan ایشان

About This Artist

Ishan ایشان is a performance collective founded by Armineh Astanbous and Rachael Sharkland. Their work seeks to undo the rule of certainty and category in the name of curiosity, difference, experience, and adaptation. Together they explore the construction of self at the intersection of perspectives, practices, rituals, and orders of (un)thinking. Ishan is a conversation, a relationship, and a technique of perception.

Armineh Astanbous was born in Tehran, a city where dance is forbidden. Despite the regime’s prohibition, she continued to pursue her passion and joined the Iran Invisible Center of Dance and co-founded the dance collective MaHa, which held the first private dance festival in Tehran.  She is committed to elevating the voices of women and immigrants, especially those whose daily experience is one of precarity and isolation.  Her work is radically vulnerable, expressive of humanity, and focused on social justice. 

With a background in dance, landscape and urban design, Rachael Sharkland delights in the entanglement of somatic, ecological, and social being. Her recent work examines embodied response to vulnerability and power. She has shown work at SAFEhouse Arts, Joe Goode Annex, Fort Mason, The Exploratorium, ZSpace, Little Boxes Theater, and Pro Arts Gallery. 

Dasha Bulatova is a poet and speech and language therapist born in Moscow, Russia, and living in Oakland. She is an MFA student at San Francisco State University and holds a BA in Linguistics from UC Berkeley. Dasha will collaborate as poet and linguist to help craft and examine the narrative and semantic underpinning of the project. 

For the past 15 years, Pauline Canteneur has collaborated and trained with contemporary dance artists in France and the US including Stéphanie Chatton, Fabio Crestale, and Christine Cali. Pauline will be a performer and has worked with Rachael and Armineh on two previous projects.

Rae Diamond is a musician and artist who weaves sound, breath, light, and language into durational and ephemeral worlds that stimulate altered states of perception and attunement with nature. Rae founded, directs, and composes for the Long Tone Choir, and has worked with Rachael on two previous projects. She will participate throughout our creative process to create iterative soundscapes and a final score for the piece.  

jane selna is grateful to have grown up on the land of the Chumash people (in so-called San Luis Obispo, CA).  She now lives here on Ramaytush Ohlone land where she moves and is moved daily by the hearts of dear people, by places, by vivid dreams, and through endless transformation. jane is currently making art with Natalya Shoaf, Hope Mohr Dance, and with this collection of humans. She has recently begun to dive more deeply into learning American Sign Language, singing! (for the sheer joy of it and to heal her lungs), and playing with the connections between sleeping, rest, standing her ground, presence, and action.

Clarissa Dyas is a movement artist, creator, and performer with roots from Berkeley, CA. She centers her artistic practice around the intersection of identities including investigating black + asian lineage, queerness and the belief that movement is a spiritual practice to liberated justice. Clarissa graduated from San Francisco State University in 2017 with a B.A. in Dance and a B.S. in Health Education. She has been honored to be a company member of Robert Moses’ Kin and ka·nei·see | collective, a founding member of bananarama, and has performed in works by Talli Jackon, Raissa Simpson and many others. Clarissa is most recently in collaboration with Flyaway Productions, Zaccho Dance Theater, Lenora Lee Dance and Raisa Punkki.

Maryam Bagheri is an Iranian contemporary dancer, choreographer, and researcher, based in Auckland, New Zealand where she is completing her PhD in Dance Studies. She has been invited to international festivals and symposiums including Dancing on the Edge (2017, Netherlands), Bipod (2018, Lebanon), IDOCDE (Vienna, 2019) and The Lived Female Body in Performance (University of Leeds, 2019).

About This Project

These Teeth explores the conditioned figure of the female voice as it influences subjectivity and embodied experience. The work considers voice both as a proxy for identity, self-presentation, and agency, and a phenomenon with material qualities, such as grain, affect, prosody, pitch, and resonance. We are an ensemble of international women artists (Iranian, Russian, French, and North American) collaborating across disciplines including movement, music, voice, linguistics, and poetry. We draw on personal experience and consider the female voice and body more broadly as it has been disciplined into thinking, speaking, and moving along ligatures that re-inscribe its voicelessness. In refusing these terms that subjugate and censor, our process exalts the range and capacity of the feminine body and voice.

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These Teeth from Rachael Sharkland on Vimeo.